Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

End of Japanese community

support.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 820 posts

Re: End of Japanese community

#471

Post by gwd »

haunter wrote: post #287
jasonkester wrote: post #283

Can anybody provide some context for this? I can’t parse what’s going on from the post or the comments here, and there’s no navigation on that page to anywhere but “support “ It sounds like something is happening. What is it?

Machine translated KB articles are destroying the japanese translations made by humans (and probably other languages too) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387...

> If the MT-generated revision isn't reviewed within a set timeframe (which will be communicated later), it will be automatically approved and published, clearly labeled to indicate that it was translated by AI translation was used.

The complaint seems to indicate this "set timeframe" was 72 hours. Add to the fact that there's decent likelihood of an avalanche of articles "that haven't been updated in 6 months", this seems pretty ridiculous to have put into place before at least getting sign-off from senior maintainers that the translations were of sufficient quality.

Re: End of Japanese community

#472

Post by j1436go »

jogu wrote: post #57
gyomu wrote: post #18

As a multilingual/multicultural human it’s been pretty weird witnessing what AI translation has been doing to regional languages & cultures on the internet in the last few years. Sure we had machine translation before, but it was still a little off. Now the latest language models get us 99.9% there, so they are judged good enough to deploy at scale. What results is a weird twilight zone where everything is in your la…

I've really disliked Reddit's auto-translation. I'm bilingual (English & Japanese) and when I search for things only to get an auto-translated reddit thread it really is bizarre. The references, flow of the conversation, etc. are all just off and it feels weird.

Same for German. It's horrible.

Re: End of Japanese community

#473

Post by crote »

xxs wrote: post #340
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also I'd expect if a person volunteers as translator they'd be pretty decent at speaking. Translators (of texts) are not interpreters.

To learn nuances, spoken language is quite important. I am not a translator and English is not my 1st language (technically) - I'd have no issues 'hopping' on a call.

I do. My written English is orders of magnitude better than my spoken English - simply because I practice it a lot more.

I have no problem "hopping on a call" if it's a casual conversation between friends, but when stakes actually matter it would be stupid to put myself in a worse position than strictly necessary. Native speakers have a habit of talking a lot, talking fast, and talking with a lot of subtleties, nuances, and hidden meanings. In written conversations I can read a sentence twice and think a second about the right phrasing to use in response, but in face-to-face conversations this is simply not possible.

It would be like a professional debater like college kids "debating" with late Charlie Kirk: no wonder they end up "getting owned" - they are punching way above their weight class!

Re: End of Japanese community

#474

Post by gadders »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #421
apexalpha wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this. It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.

As a native English speaker, I don't see it as condescending either. Yes it's a bit "corporate" in tone, but that is not uncommon at all in large human organisations (not just for-profit corporations but also government, NGOs, political orgs, etc). Also the reality is that "hopping on a call" can often help to resolve problems that would otherwise devolve into months of bikeshedding on mailing lists. Which is often e…

It's not really an apology - it's "I'm sorry you feel that way" and not "I'm sorry for the thing we did wrong".

Re: End of Japanese community

#475

Post by crote »

rramadass wrote: post #186
kaveh_h wrote: post #17

Some people do these type of contribution or charity work not just to do some good but also to feel some autonomy and mastery in a world were much of the regular top down driven drudgery work does not provide much of that feeling. These people are canaries in the coal mine. I expect more people feel a loss of purpose and rise of anxiety and depression in the world.

Exactly right! With the AI juggernaut picking up steam, i expect this is going to happen sooner rather than later. That said, Mozilla clearly handled this the wrong way; they should have informed the volunteers before throwing the switch.

> they should have informed the volunteers before throwing the switch

No, they should have involved the volunteers in the design process.

Re: End of Japanese community

#476

Post by j1436go »

latentsea wrote: post #34
gyomu wrote: post #18

As a multilingual/multicultural human it’s been pretty weird witnessing what AI translation has been doing to regional languages & cultures on the internet in the last few years. Sure we had machine translation before, but it was still a little off. Now the latest language models get us 99.9% there, so they are judged good enough to deploy at scale. What results is a weird twilight zone where everything is in your la…

I'm a native English speaker fluent in Japanese, recently moved to Japan this year. The one that really gets me lately is YouTube now automatically dubbing over content in Japanese that was originally in English. It's... so uncanny.

Me and my GF had plenty of laughs in the beginning. Now it's become just annoying.

Re: End of Japanese community

#477

Post by Peaches4Rent »

nozilla wrote: post #252

> Hi Marsf, > I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with. > My timezone is UTC+7, so it should be easier for us to set up time. Let me know how that sound! What a horribly condescending and patronising resp…

It's the "I'm sorry how you feel" that's the problem here.

If they just said "Hi, I want to see how we can fix this. Can we get on a call".

It sounds much better

Re: End of Japanese community

#478

Post by p_l »

krick wrote: post #50
ares623 wrote: post #3

This is rich > We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with. The post literally starts with a list of grievances. Maybe ask the AI for an executive summary and the key points.

[flagged]

The standard for fixing something this broken is stop the bot, revert the rollout, revert changes to pages affected, then attempt to figure out what went wrong. Even if you haven't done it yet, announce the revert steps, FFS.

Re: End of Japanese community

#479

Post by LunaSea »

OvbiousError wrote: post #436
denkmoon wrote: post #250

Ladybird and other browser alternatives cannot come fast enough. Every other week we've got a thread here about some stupid move Mozilla have made, I can't remember the last time I heard positive news about Mozilla.

There is a very loud part of HN that strongly dislikes mozilla/firefox. It's disproportionate imo, I don't understand why they're singled out so often.

Gobbling up hundreds of millions of dollars to finance non-core missions and fat director bonuses while you sack the Servo development team might be a cause.

Re: End of Japanese community

#480

Post by tbrake »

oldnetguy wrote: post #463
NoboruWataya wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native English speaker, I don't see it as condescending either. Yes it's a bit "corporate" in tone, but that is not uncommon at all in large human organisations (not just for-profit corporations but also government, NGOs, political orgs, etc). Also the reality is that "hopping on a call" can often help to resolve problems that would otherwise devolve into months of bikeshedding on mailing lists. Which is often e…

Native English speaker and worked in IT in multiple corporations for over 30 years and none of this is condescending. The person is trying to reach out and talk. This is not to dismiss what happened, but to just address the poster who thinks this is condescending.

Reframing someone's disagreement as them "struggling with something" is incredibly patronizing and condescending and dirty conversational pool.
Post reply on HN